Awhile back, I raved about MediaTomb and how great it was but there was one little issue that made me try Serviio: streaming subtitles support.
Being able to actually see the subtitles is sort of a big deal when you’re watching someone scream craziness in a Takashi Miike film, so I killed an evening learning how to install Serviio on my Debian LAMP server.
Here are a few preliminaries:
Download and install Serviio:
Unpack it. I did this from my home directory for the hell of it (but you can unpack it anywhere):
tar xvf serviio-0.5.2-linux.tar.gz
Install java and ffmpeg if you haven’t already
apt-get install default-jre
apt-get install ffmpeg
Now for the fun part and the major fail of Serviio. Serviio’s one major flaw is that it doesn’t have a web interface. This means that you have to configure it FROM the place that you installed it. Basically, if you’re serving movies or music with Serviio on your network, you have to configure it ON the machine where it’s installed. What is this, 1994? You can workaround this by using VNC or connecting a monitor to your server or whatever your setup is. Up to you.
First run Serviio from the bin directory (you should create an init script for this later)
Now launch the serviio console:
When the console launches, you can configure the paths to your media folders, i.e., video, music and photos. Pretty straightforward.
And that’s it! You don’t even need to configure Serviio’s profiles.xml, where you need to tweak mediaTomb’s config.xml to get it to work properly.
Now someone please tell me: How is it that mediaTomb hasn’t figured out how to stream subtitles AND have a kick ass web interface, yet, Serviio DOES support streaming subtitles but DOESN’T have a web interface? How is this possible? Please, someone introduce the mediaTomb people with the Serviio gang so that they can have sex and give birth to a fully functioning piece of software.